President Donald Trump signed the so-called "Big, Beautiful Bill" into law on the Fourth of July, bringing to a close a weekslong back and forth in Washington about the fate of the massive spending package.
The bill includes a historic sum of some $170 billion for immigration enforcement and border security.
That means additional money for construction along the border in Arizona and other states — the package puts more than $46 billion toward more wall projects. Another $15 billion will go toward Customs and Border Protection facilities and other initiatives.
The new money will add to existing funding already being used for border construction. Several weeks ago, the Trump administration announced plans to build a more than 20 mile stretch of wall across a biodiversity hot spot in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands called the San Rafael Valley.
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Arizona is considering pumping water from a desalination plant on the Gulf of California to boost its water supply, but would need buy-in from Mexico. -
Arizona U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton is one of the congressional representatives who introduced the bill after threats from President Donald Trump. -
The Trump administration says it’s deported more than 600,000 people in the first year of its aggressive deportation campaign. And, a whole lot of them have gone to Mexico. -
Nearly a year after launching the initiative to publicize arrests and drug busts in Mexican states near the border with the United States, authorities have also seized more than 7,000 firearms and 600 kilograms of fentanyl. -
Alexandra Markovich was born in Ukraine — the country is still entangled in a hard-fought war against Russia, one of the world’s premier military powers. But, she never imagined there would be much overlap between her work here in the Southwest.
